Devil's Knot
by Chaotic Serenity
Summary: The third day after Chloe learns the devil walks the Earth, she makes herself a cup of coffee and gets the hell out of L.A.


**Devil's Knot**

The third morning after Chloe Decker discovers the devil walks the Earth, she makes herself coffee. She measures out three teaspoons in careful, exacting manner, leveling them off with a hand, human and whole, before adding scalding water. She watches as the digital numbers tick upward, the minutes stretching out long and heavy. At seven, she carries her cup with her, hardly tasting it, and wakes her daughter: informs her she will be missing school today, drops her little girl's Disney suitcase on the bed, and instructs her to pack a month's worth of clothing. Mommy has to leave for a few weeks, she says in the careful, practiced way she has been rehearsing for days now, and Trixie will be staying with Daddy for a month or so while things are sorted out at the precinct.

Trixie blinks up at her with bright little girl eyes and asks, innocent as babes, whether the devil will be with her. Chloe grits her teeth against the knife in her heart, smiles big and toothy, and answers _no, monkey he will not_, and presses a soothing hand against her daughter's cheek. Feels the smoothness of unblemished skin, the frailty of little girl bones. The shiver that winds its way through her body is ferocious, races down her arm to make the cup shake in her hand, fractures the moment. She puts it down on the bed stand, pulls Trixie into her arms, holds her as tight as a shackle and chain, wishing she could go further, deeper, could put her back in the womb where she was safe and free of a world Chloe no longer understands.

The devil does not lie, but Chloe does. Chloe tells her daughter that everything will be fine - _everything. is. fine._ \- all of this will be sorted out with time, with space, with waiting. Trixie looks her speculatively, wary, her mother's daughter through and through, but nods carefully and does as she is told, her own practiced script. The bullet lodged in Chloe's throat burns on the way down, and she cannot speak for the while now, feeling the bruise of a poorly aimed shot burn with every breath.

The devil does not call or text her, does not kick in her door and trample all over her carefully constructed normality. The devil is the least self-aware person she has ever met, but even he seems to understand the enormity of what has happened, the detritus in his wake. She _knows_ now, knows the agony of the knowing, a memory so crystalline in the purity of its recollection even the Lethe could not wipe it clean.

Dan arrives at nine, and Chloe tries not to startle when he knocks, a stone in her belly. The motions of readying Trixie, preparing her to leave, are familiar and fine, a calming balm that allows her to focus. She kisses Trixie twice, one for each delicate cheek, and urges her out the door, pressing on her with hands weighty and cold. When Dan lingers in the doorway, asks how she is holding up, she smiles and lies, lies and lies and lies, feels the scum of it on her perfectly white teeth. When he reaches out to embrace her, to say _i'm sorry_, she lets him, because she really is. The world is upside down, sideways, and she hates it.

Chloe leaves town at noon. Locks the doors, says her goodbyes, sits for a long time in her car, her hands on the wheel, trembling and uncertain. Finally, she forces them steady, turns the key, guns the motor. She drives without stopping, without mind to present or past, a blank space carved out in the displaced boundaries of her world. She does not think of the years she spent riding shotgun to the devil, the way he had smiled at her in the cool, briny air of the open highway, slyly and inescapably beautiful. She does not think of where the devil is now, silent and alone. Chloe Decker drives determined to leave the city of fallen angels behind her without a backwards glance.

The hotel is cheap but functional, the exact sort the devil would not be caught dead staying (if he _could_ die), and Chloe swallows the relief of stale air so deeply it makes her chest hurt, her eyes water. She is far enough away now that she can feel the clasp of the devil's manicured fist loosen and release her. For the first time in days, she suffers no shortness of breath, no stiffness of limbs, no stone on her chest, tight and heavy. When she puts herself to bed that night, she lays with the heaviness of a corpse, weighty with a life past and gone.

(He follows her, of course. The devil prowls about her dreams, his eyes feverish and inferno bright. It puts his hands upon her, scarred and roughened, his whisper sounds in her ear, God's poison. _detective_, the devil says, his mouth is on her neck, his arms are around her. _chloe_ it sighs, and its mouth is open and honeyed, full of sharp teeth and soft words, _this is real, isn't it?_ it whispers, and then he kisses her, so sweetly it makes her heart stutter in her chest. And she kisses him back, impossibly foolish, the woman who bites the fruit of the devil and says, _not to me, you aren't_, and when he looks at her his eyes are filled with the stars of his love.)

She wakes up crying, more afraid than she has ever been in her life.


End file.
